Clement of Alexandria

Originally published more than twenty years ago, just last month an electronic version of this book was released: Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy by Denise Kimber Buell (Princeton University Press, 2020), 224pp.

Clement remains, as I noted on here some time back, a very intriguing figure who sits ambivalently in many Christian traditions and calendars. About him and this book the publisher tells us this:

How did second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity? In this innovative book, Denise Buell argues that many early Christians deployed the metaphors of procreation and kinship in the struggle over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practice, and doctrine. In particular, she examines the intriguing works of the influential theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-210 c.e.), for whom cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship played an important role in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic.

Buell argues that metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve to make power differentials appear natural. She shows that early Christian authors recognized this and often turned to such metaphors to mark their own positions as legitimate and marginalize others as false. Attention to the functions of this language offers a way out of the trap of reconstructing the development of early Christianity along the axes of “heresy” and “orthodoxy,” while not denying that early Christians employed this binary. Ultimately, Buell argues, strategic use of kinship language encouraged conformity over diversity and had a long lasting effect both on Christian thought and on the historiography of early Christianity.

Aperceptive and closely argued contribution to early Christian studies, Making Christians also branches out to the areas of kinship studies and the social construction of gender.

Classifying Christians and Heretics

The University of California Press continues to publish impressive and important studies in early Christian history, not least, as I noted earlier, the Syriac Christian tradition.

From California I recently received in the mail a new study: Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity by Todd S. Berzon (2016), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

Medieval Heresies

I inhabit two worlds, both of which have more in common than either would ever admit: the modern academy, and the modern Church. In the former, it is customary on the part of some modern scholars to disdain the whole concept of "heresy" (always in scare-quotes) as nothing more than a nakedly political power-grab in which the "victors" impose certain views ("orthodoxy") on the vanquished. In the latter, one encounters, as I sometimes do, certain self-selecting "traditionalist" Christians--both Catholic and  Orthodox--who profligately toss around the word "heretic" and its cognates for every idea, person, or practice they do not understand or do not find compatible with their own straitened and highly modern concept of orthodoxy. The former assume that heresy does not really exist; the latter raise continual doubts as to whether orthodoxy really exists any more except in small, and ever shrinking, groups--whether "old Mass" groups, "old calendarist" groups, or similar bodies. Neither group, in other words, is disciplined enough when it comes to dealing with heresy and both groups paint with too wide a brush.

Still, for all that, I'd rather have people too concerned with heresy than indifferent to the whole question of truth, which seems to be our lot today if my students are a representative sample. Not a few of them regularly express not just amazement but even a certain degree of disdain for the debates of the ecumenical councils--especially the first four, and the seventh. High-level debates over doctrinal orthodoxy make about as much sense to them as fisticuffs in the grocery store over which brand of margarine is superior: who cares. None of this stuff matters, right? Just go along to get along.

How different an approach that modern indifference is to most of Christian history--but also, as a new book makes clear, to Jewish and Islamic history as well: Christine Caldwell Ames, Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (Cambridge UP, 2015), 368pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages were divided in many ways. But one thing they shared in common was the fear that God was offended by wrong belief. Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is the first comparative survey of heresy and its response throughout the medieval world. Spanning England to Persia, it examines heresy, error, and religious dissent - and efforts to end them through correction, persuasion, or punishment - among Latin Christians, Greek Christians, Jews, and Muslims. With a lively narrative that begins in the late fourth century and ends in the early sixteenth century, Medieval Heresies is an unprecedented history of how the three great monotheistic religions of the Middle Ages resembled, differed from, and even interrelated with each other in defining heresy and orthodoxy.

The publisher also gives us a the table of contents here: PDF; and a list of the books virtues thus: 

• The only comparative survey of medieval heresy to consider Islam, Judaism, and Greek Christianity, in addition to Latin-European Christianity
• Features images and maps from all of the traditions and periods covered in the book, as well as suggestions for further reading, timelines and a full bibliography
• Outlines and incorporates the major historiographical trends and contested issues
• Vivid examples and quotations from primary sources break up the text and enliven the narrative

Orthodox Constructions of the West: II

When we last met, we heard from one of the contributors to the collection Orthodox Constructions of the West on the question of primacy in Orthodox ecclesiology. Let us now proceed back to the beginning of the book and the introduction and opening historical essays, all of which are, alone, worth the price of the book. As I noted in my first comments, this is an invaluable book that deserves the widest possible audience.

The editors provide the introduction, noting that it is not designed to be a comprehensive re-telling of the history of relations between East and West. Nevertheless, they do set forth an expansive and carefully considered narrative which goes some considerable distance toward "clearing the swamp" (Stanley Hauerwas) of received notions. (Many of the shibboleths people repeat in the dolorous narrative of East-West division are manifestly of recent vintage, and many issues we today commonly insist are paramount were of little concern to our forebears.) But more than that, the editors set forth the vision of this volume, and of the conference that preceded it, noting that "the categories of East and West are always fluid, always multiform, and almost always projections of an imagined difference" (2; my emphasis). This emphasis on an imagined difference is a leitmotif in many of the essays that follow.

Robert Taft's essay is vintage Taft. Much of it will, of course, be very familiar to those who read Taft. Parts of this paper, in fact, were used in another paper of his at the Orientale Lumen conference in 2011 when I was on a panel with him and others, including Sr. Vassa Larin of ROCOR; and Met. Kallistos Ware, the retired Greek Orthodox theologian from Oxford. Taft's opening is worth quoting in extenso because it sums up perfectly my own views of, approach towards, and love for the Orthodox Christian East:

I consider the Orthodox Churches the historic apostolic Christianity of the East and sister churches of the Catholic Church;...I recognize and rejoice in the fact that Orthodox peoples remain Orthodox; the Catholic Church should support and collaborate with the Orthodox Churches in every way, foster the most cordial relations with them, earnestly work to restore communion with them, recognize their legitimate interests especially on their home ground, avoid all proselytism among their flocks there or elsewhere, not seek in any way to undercut them, nor rejoice in or exploit their weaknesses, nor fish in their pond, nor seek to convert their faithful to the Catholic Church.

After this, Taft notes that it's important to begin with self-criticism, and so he goes into some detail about how his own Jesuit predecessors badly mangled relations with the Christian East in places such as India, Ethiopia, and Eastern Europe, especially, of course, what is today known as Ukraine. This latter brings to mind the controverted history of "Uniatism," about which Taft is as blunt and detailed here as in the rest of the essay.

Having criticized the Catholic Church in unsparing terms, Taft then lists a number of areas where we are still waiting for more honest self-criticism and -assessment from the Orthodox. By laying out the facts, Taft shows how, e.g., the idea that no Orthodox country ever used the power of the state to compel non-Orthodox to believe is revealed to be without foundation--both in the early Byzantine period (cf. the fate of the Copts or Armenians) and later as under, e.g., the Russian tsars. The idea that the residents of Constantinople in 1204 were as pure and innocent as the driven snow, and thus complete victims of the Fourth Crusade, conveniently overlooks the fact of a pogrom against the Latins in the city organized and murderously carried out by the Greeks in 1182. Orthodox treatment of Greek Catholics in Romania and Ukraine in the immediate post-war period of the 1940s is another area where frank admission is still wanting. The point of this list (and other many examples Taft provides) is not to engage in a tit-for-tat--what Taft memorably in 2011 called the "my hands are cleaner than yours" approach to history; but simply to show that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of our romanticized pasts.

Taft's essay is followed by two others, equally historically impressive in different ways though less widely focused. The historian Tia Kolbaba, author of such important studies (which I had expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies) as Inventing Latin Heretics: Byzantines and the Filioque in the Ninth Century and The Byzantine Lists: ERRORS OF THE LATINS, draws on her historical expertise to treat relations between Byzantines, Armenians, and Latins on the question of whether to use yeast in the eucharistic bread, a controversy she traces to the tenth century. This is a fascinating essay in which she reveals that the common problem of the time was an inability to conceive of difference that was not seen as "heretical," a term which, she notes, still needs further historical elaboration and differentiation  in the Byzantine period.

Kolbaba's essay is followed by "Light from the West: Byzantine Readings of Aquinas" by Marcus Plested, who has, of course, recently published an entire book on Orthodoxy and Aquinas, which I discussed here while interviewing the author here. In the next installment, we'll look at what Plested unearths here, and a few of the other essays that follow. To be continued. 

Irenaeus of Lyons

As I have frequently noted on here, we have seen a very considerable resurgence of interest in Irenaeus of Lyons in the last decade. Along comes another book from one of Orthodoxy's foremost patrologists, John Behr, set for release next month: Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (OUP, 2013), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

This book provides a full, contextual study of St Irenaeus of Lyons, the first great theologian of the Christian tradition. John Behr sets Irenaeus both within his own context of the second century, a fundamental period for the formation of Christian identity, elaborating the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy and expounding a comprehensive theological vision, and also within our own contemporary context, in which these issues are very much alive again. Against the commonly-held position that 'orthodoxy' was established by excluding others, the 'heretics', Behr argues that it was the self-chosen separation of the heretics that provided the occasion for those who remained together to clarify the lineaments of their faith in a church that was catholic by virtue of embracing different voices in a symphony of many voices and whose chief architect was Irenaeus, who, as befits his name, urged peace and toleration.The first chapter explores Irenaeus' background in Asia Minor, as a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna, his activity in Gaul, and his involvement with the Christian communities in Rome. The theological and institutional significance of his interventions is made clear by tracing the coalescence of the initially fractionated communities in Rome into a united body over the first two centuries.The second chapter provides a full examination of Irenaeus' surviving writings, concentrating especially on the literary and rhetorical structure of his five books Against the Heresies, his 'refutation and overthrowal' of his opponents in the first two books, and his establishing a framework for articulating orthodoxy.The final chapter explores the theological vision of Irenaeus itself, on its own terms rather than the categories of later dogmatic theology, grounded in an apostolic reading of Scripture and presenting a vibrant and vigorous account of the diachronic and synchronic economy or plan of God, seen through the work of Christ which reveals how the Hands of God have been at work from the beginning, fashioning the creature, made from mud and animated with a breath of life, into his own image and likeness, vivified by the Holy Spirit, to become a 'living human being, the glory of God'.

Ross Douthat on Bad Religion

I recently finished reading Ross Douthat's book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012), 352pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails—and why it threatens to take American society with it.Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation’s political and economic crises. He argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.

These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the real thing. Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith—which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the civil rights movement—through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich,” a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline. His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

This is a well-written and smoothly edited book with whose arguments I generally agree. Douthat shows in some, but not overwhelming, detail how most versions of Christianity in America--by which he means Protestantism and Catholicism: Orthodoxy is basically invisible in this book--have been corrupted--perhaps unconsciously in a few cases--by various ideas to greater or lesser degrees originating in the singularity of American culture and history. That history and culture have given birth to some entire sui generis faiths, in fact, which are in significant ways simply Christian grotesques: Mormonism, of course, is the clearest example of this. But Mormonism, at least directly, remains strange enough to most that it is not nearly the threat that the "prosperity gospel" poses.

This "gospel" has gone a very long way not only to give cover to all those repellent preachers on TV hawking "water from the Jordan" or "sand from the Holy Land" or but has also, I think, made serious inroads into Orthodoxy and Catholicism in North America, both of which have moved a long way from the faith of immigrants, peasants, and workers to being much more "mainstream" and "respectable" in some ways. That process, for understandable and often commendable socioeconomic reasons, has not come without some cost--what I would, as a kind of short-hand, refer to as the "bourgeoisification" of Christianity in North America--how very middle class it is in mores and much else. The clearest evidence of this, to my mind, remains the fact that contemporary Orthodoxy and Catholicism have not produced--as far as I can see--any contemporary "holy fools" of a truly outstanding and outrageous nature. Perhaps, given their propensity for "hiding" their holiness, there are many fools among us, but I should like them to have a more public presence if they are indeed around. Christians need to be reminded, often, that Christianity should not neatly coincide with middle-class notions of respectability and comfort. As I put it to my students earlier this year when looking at the holy fool in the movie Ostrov, if your faith does not make you seem at least a little strange to people around you, you are probably not doing it right.

When he was here in 2008, I well recall Pope Benedict raising the question that perhaps, in the often understandable rush from various "ghettos" in which pre-war Catholics lived for the prosperous and diffuse suburbs, something had been lost that needed to be reconsidered. A fortiori this seems true to me when considering the material prosperity of Christians on this continent. There is nothing wrong with being middle class, and much that is good for which we should be grateful. But I think there is an invidious corruption of orthodox Christianity that too often accompanies material prosperity--we become soft, unwilling to sacrifice, complacent in all kinds of practices, especially ascetical ones. (Eastern Christians must check temptations to pride here: while we have, in theory, retained, e.g., far more fasting days than Western Christians, how many of us actually practice them with some rigor? How many of us--as others have commented--restrain the impulse for ostentatious trips to Whole Foods to get "just the right kind" of hummus during Great Lent, or to make sure the recipe for lentils and shrimp goes well with the Gewürztraminer we have selected for those days on which, by some mystery, wine is allowed?)

The problem with the so-called prosperity gospel, at least in the survey Douthat provides of many of its pamphleteers and propagators (of whom the oleaginous Joel Osteen is probably reigning champion today), is that it conflates spiritual and material blessings, and it seems not only totally ignorant of, but positively immune to, any of the ascetical practices that have marked Christianity from the beginning: fasting, abstinence, and other forms of self-renunciation. It also seems to traffic in--to use Eric Voegelin's famous phrase--an immanentization of the eschaton, seeming to promise people that all the limitations, problems, and sufferings of a fallen world can be largely if not entirely overcome if we pray the right prayers the right way and just "hope" enough.

This needs to be challenged more than it is, but Douthat's main brief is that a lot more needs to be challenged as well: preachers and hierarchs need to be more vigorous in "rightly imparting the word of your truth," as we pray in the Chrysostom anaphora. Douthat is not calling on bishops to become scolds or moralizers, but simply to be more vigilant than many have been hitherto in checking egregious departures from apostolic Christianity. Of course, this leaves unanswered the age-old question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Douthat does not address this question, and he leaves other important questions unasked, but his book does give us clear and sober insights into the kind of Weltanschauung many Christians have today, and there is much to be learned here.

Heresy's History

It has for too long been a tedious habit on the part of some academics and others to sneer at the very categories of "heresy" and "orthodoxy," viewing them through the so-called hermeneutic of suspicion as merely labels crudely covering nothing more than a will to power. But if you read early Christian history, you know how seriously Christians felt about these issues and how crucial it was to get them right. Routledge e-mails me this week with word of a new book that has just been released treating the history of the concept of heresy: Robert M. Royalty, The Origin of Heresy: A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (Routledge 2012), 246pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

Heresy is a central concept in the formation of Orthodox Christianity. Where does this notion come from? This book traces the construction of the idea of ‘heresy’ in the rhetoric of ideological disagreements in Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts and in the development of the polemical rhetoric against ‘heretics,’ called heresiology. Here, author Robert Royalty argues, one finds the origin of what comes to be labelled ‘heresy’ in the second century. In other words, there was such as thing as ‘heresy’ in ancient Jewish and Christian discourse before it was called ‘heresy.’ And by the end of the first century, the notion of heresy was integral to the political positioning of the early orthodox Christian party within the Roman Empire and the range of other Christian communities.This book is an original contribution to the field of Early Christian studies. Recent treatments of the origins of heresy and Christian identity have focused on the second century rather than on the earlier texts including the New Testament. The book further makes a methodological contribution by blurring the line between New Testament Studies and Early Christian studies, employing ideological and post-colonial critical methods.

Dionysius Between Orthodoxy and Heresy

2012 will see at least two new studies that I am aware of on the person, work, and legacy of that mysterious character known to history as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Another was released in November of last year: Filip Ivanovich, Dionysius the Areopagite Between Orthodoxy and Heresy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 187pp.

The publisher provides the following overview of this book:

Dionysius the Areopagite between Orthodoxy and Heresy aims to explore the thought of one of the most controversial characters of Christian history, Dionysius the Areopagite, and put it in a correct context, between pagan (namely Neoplatonic) philosophy on the one side, and Christian theology, on the other. In significant part, the book examines Dionysius Neoplatonic sources, but it also offers insights into the original points of his philosophy and theology, thus showing how he managed to achieve a masterful integration of pagan thought and newly revealed faith. The chapters of the book, taken together, try to offer a broad insight into the Areopagite s thought, through examining not just his intellectual background and milieu, but also some of the crucial features of his work, such as notions of hierarchy, deification, apophatic and cataphatic theologies, icon, and others. This work is of a multidisciplinary character, since Dionysius thought has been studied from different points of view, so the contributions range from philosophy and theology to history and art history. Dionysius the Areopagite between Orthodoxy and Heresy is intended for both specialists and non-specialists. Apart from being a collection of specific studies, it can also serve as an introduction to the Areopagite s thought, and will be useful to all those interested in late antique and early Christian philosophy and theology, patristics, and cultural studies in general.

Heresy and Heterodoxy

It has of course been fashionable in some academic circles for some time (everything changes except the avant garde, as the late Richard John Neuhaus used to say) to decry the very categories of "heresy" and "orthodoxy," as often as not saying that the latter is merely a disguised will-to-power over the former. And yet Christians have always felt the need to make sure that what is taught is in fact the truth. For a faith committed to following the One who is Himself described as the "way, the truth, and the life," concern about such questions is not just Nietzsche on the cheap.

Eastern Christians are intimately familiar with the problems of heterodox thought since the majority of heresies, at least in the antique period, were of Eastern provenance. Several recent books have helped us come to a greater appreciation of these issues, and the complexity surrounding them. A recent one comes from the prolific pen of the celebrated evangelical theologian Alister McGrath, author of numerous other works:

• The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind 
• Christian Theology: An Introduction 
• Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty?
• Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things
• Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Faith
• Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
• Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
• Theology: The Basics
• A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology (Gifford Lectures)

One of McGrath's works recently released in paperback is Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth (HarperOne, 2010), 288pp. 
About this book, the publisher tells us:

In recent years the distinction between heresy and orthodoxy has come under fire by those eager to reject the formal boundaries of sanctioned beliefs about God, Jesus, and the church. In a timely corrective to this trend, renowned church historian Alister McGrath argues that the categories of heresy and orthodoxy must be preserved.
Remaining faithful to Jesus's mission and message is still the mandate of the church despite increasingly popular cries that traditional dogma is outdated and restricts individual freedom. Overturning misconceptions throughout the book, McGrath exposes:

• how many of the heretical beliefs and practices rejected by the church were actually more stringent and oppressive than rival orthodox claims.
• that many theological alternatives were rejected when the church had no power to enforce one view over another, long before Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

In Heresy, McGrath explains why no heresy has ever been eradicated—rival beliefs only go underground and resurface in different forms. McGrath presents a powerful, compassionate, and deeply attractive orthodoxy that will equip the church to meet the challenge from renewed forms of heresy today.

Heresies and Heretics in Early and Eastern Christianity

Next month Peeters is bringing out (as part of their on-going Eastern Christian Studies series) a new volume edited by H.G.B. Teule and J. Verheyden, Heretics and Heresies in the Ancient Church and in Eastern Christianity: Studies in Honour of Adelbert Davids (Eastern Christian Studies) (Peeters, 2011), x+395pp. 

This book, the publisher informs us, is published

in honour of Adelbert Davids, professor emeritus of Patristic studies at the Faculty of Theology of the Radboud University Nijmegen and former editor-in-chief of The Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, was first published in that same journal in 2008. As this issue is sold out the book is here reprinted in the companion series of Eastern Christian Studies. Heretics and Heresies in the Ancient Church and in Eastern Christianity opens with a biographical note (by P. Nissen) and contains eighteen essays by friends and colleagues of the honoree that all deal with one or another aspect of the crucial question of how the Early Church and the Eastern Church have defined heresy and orthodoxy.

The contributors are: B. Dehandschutter (heresy and the notion of tradition), A. Hilhorst ('heretical' martyrs), A. van den Hoek (Heracleon's hermeneutics), F. Ledegang (the Ophites), J. van Amersfoort (the Ebionites), K. Demoen (fourth-century thelogy on the notion of heresy), J. Leemans (Gregory of Nyssa on orthodoxy and heresy), J. Verheyden (Epiphanius' Panarion), D. Müller (persecution of heretics under Justinian), P. Van Deun (editio princeps of tractate CPG 7697,25 by Maximus the Confessor), A.A.R. Bastiaensen (the notion of perfidus/perfidia), M. Parmentier (editio princeps of CPL 560, a guideline against heretics), G. Bartelink (Cassianus's De incarnatione), D.W. Winkler (Nestorian controversy in the seventh century), H. Kaufhold (regulations against heresy and heretics in canon law in the Eastern Churches), H. Teule (Barhebraeus), F.B. Poljakow (traces of gnosticising thought currents in early twentieth-century Russia), B. Groen (dealing with anti-judaism in Byzantine liturgy today).

I look forward to seeing this expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.